Seasons Greetings to all Practitioners
The LCS extends seasons greetings to all the world’s practitioners and looks forward to a value adding new year.
Professional Doctorate in Operational Excellence
Run by the Buckingham Lean Enterprise Unit, the part time Professional Doctorate in Operational Excellence offers the opportunity for those with an enthusiasm for learning to gain a doctoral degree, the highest level of professional qualification available, in support of their professional career.
This course has been designed to produce highly trained operations professionals with the skills required to transform operations into a world-class business in all sectors. The goal of Operational Excellence is to provide superior value to the customer through all business processes.
For more information, download the Doctorate brochure.
European Lean Educators Conference – Call for Papers
The third European Lean Educator Conference (ELEC 2016) from 12-15 September 2016 is now requesting abstracts of potential papers and presentations.
The first European Lean Educator Conference took place in Stuttgart about 18 months ago and the second was held in Sweden in September 2015. Both were exceptionally good, allowing delegates to hear highly relevant keynotes, present papers and generally to network and share experiences in teaching, educating, communicating and learning lean and in related fields such as Agile software, Lean Six Sigma and Factory Physics.
Conference Theme
The theme of the conference is lean education outside of manufacturing, which could include topics such as lean product design, product and software innovation, agile and scrum, lean accounting, lean in the office, lean service, systems thinking, continuous improvement, as well as applications from healthcare, supply chain, lean in education, quality and ‘Kata’.
The 2015 conference was attended by 120 delegates, split approximately 60 / 40 between academics and lean trainers from the private and public sectors. The quality of papers was outstanding, but more important was the opportunity to learn about innovative education from across Europe.
Event Booking
Register via the Eventbrite website
Important Dates
- Call for Abstracts : from December 2015
- Deadline for submission of 200-400 word abstracts: 31 March 2016 (Please submit to BLEU@buckingham.ac.uk)
- Notification of Abstract acceptance : 1 June 2016
- Full paper (not mandatory) deadline : 1 August 2016
- Presentation slides : 1 September 2016
- Submitted papers may be included in a book edited by Prof Pauline Found & Prof John Bicheno
Itinerary
- 12th September: Pre-conference Kata Workshop for teachers and lecturers (tbc)
- 13th September: Keynote Speakers
- 14th September: Paper presentations
- 15th September: Post-conference Workshops, Games & Simulations
Presenters
There is an impressive line up of presenters:
- Sir Anthony Seldon – Innovation in Education
- Prof John Seddon – Systems Thinking and Re-thinking Lean
- Prof Pauline Found – Kata for the Environment
- Prof Christoph Roser – The Origins of Lean and Lessons for Today
- Prof Darrell Mann – Counter-Intuitives: Lean, Innovation & Complex Adaptive Systems
- Belinda Waldock – Agile for Lean People
- Teresa Hattingh – Teaching Lean to Undergraduate Engineers
Further Information, Booking and Queries
Conference website – where you can register interest
Contact John Bicheno (Organising Committee Chair)
PhD Research Programme
Introduction
The LCS is committed to improving the understanding of how lean thinking and other continuous improvement (CI) approaches benefit organisations and the impact that CI training has on employee engagement and the culture change required for sustainability.
As part of its research agenda, the LCS in conjunction with Cardiff Business School plans to recruit a PhD student to investigate this field and is inviting LCS accredited organisations to join the initiative as co-sponsors. A competitive funding applicationwas made in November and was successful so the ESRC Wales DTC has awarded 4-years of funding (at 50%).
Overall Research Theme
Continuous Improvement Training and Accreditation, Innovative Work Behaviour and Kata Approach: Building the Sustainable CI Organisation
Context & Research Questions
While organisations globally spend vast amounts each year on CI education and training, not enough are satisfied with the effectiveness of training (Lu and Betts, 2011) and a lack of standards in certification is putting at stake the credibility of lean and six sigma among industry and practitioner community (Setter, 2010; Kumar et al., 2008).
Comparing the requirements of different certifications, there are wide variations in criteria used (Snee, 2010; Hutchins, 2005; Marx, 2008), in areas such as training time, assessment methods , project requirement, inclusion of financial savings and necessity for re-certification. This has made it difficult for industry to compare the competency of CI professionals and also made it difficult to compare the effectiveness of training and consultancy partners.
It is ironic that the principles and tools of CI have been applied for over 25 years to promote standards and minimise variation, yet the industry itself lacks common standards for certification and accreditation (Hathaway, 2010; Laureani and Antony, 2012).
Given the substantial investment in CI training and accreditation, is therefore considered important to assess if this has helped to build the culture of CI in the organisation and assesses how it has influenced the innovation capability of employees.
Key Research Questions
- How should organisations develop training material that is fit for purpose?
- How can training material influence the adaptive capability of employees?
- Should an accrediting body also include an element of Kata to ingrain the learning from training material into daily habit of practising it?
- What is the link between Kata approach to improvement and coaching and innovation capabilities of organisation?
PhD Programme Details
Programme Timing
The PhD programme will last four years, commencing September 2016. The PhD student will be recruited in early 2016. The student will be supervised by a Cardiff Business School senior lecturer, plus external support will be received from the LERC research community.
Programmes Costs & Contribution
The total cost of the four year programme will be £80,000, with an Economic & Social Research Council grant covering 50% of this.
The remaining £40,000 will be covered by sponsors, the amount per sponsor dependent on the number participating. The plan is to recruit between four to six sponsors, so the annual contribution per sponsor would be around £2,500 payable in August each year for four years, starting in 2016.
Sponsor Profile
Potential sponsors should be committed to CI transformation and possess a strong belief in the power of research, learning and evaluation as an enabler of culture change and be willing to allow their organisation to fully participate in the project.
Sponsorship Benefits
Sponsoring organisations can expect the following benefits from participation:
- Access to research findings prior to public dissemination.
- Input to research design and areas of focus.
- Involvement in data collection, (as a respondent, case study).
- Case studies developed from their own organisations’ experiences.
- Exclusive periodic workshops to discuss results and consider implications for strategy.
- Exposure to the latest thinking and research in the field of study.
- Peer-to-peer learning from networking and collaboration with fellow sponsors.
- A highly cost effective means to be at the frontier of knowledge development.
Expressions of Interest
Organisations that wish to discuss involvement should contact Simon Elias or Maneesh Kumar.
Welcome to the New Website
October 2015
Welcome to the new LCS website and to the community of practitioners dedicated to using lean thinking to help improve the ability of their organisations to achieve purpose, deliver the appropriate value to their customers and stakeholders with the minimum of resources.
This website is where lean practitioners can come together to communicate ideas, debate issues, find information and solve problems. It encourages ‘peer-to-peer’ learning – that is, when everyone can be both a teacher and a learner – by promoting collaboration, networking, discussion and information sharing, leveraging the collective knowledge and experience of the community. The site also provides comprehensive information on organisational lean training system accreditation and personal LCS certification.
Members can find out more about the site by visiting the Welcome to the Community page.
Please provide feedback on any aspect of the site – on features you think should be included or areas that could be improved.
PhD Questionnaire
Andy Lehy of LCS accredited global logistics organisation, Panalpina, is currently undertaking PhD research and is looking for willing respondents for a survey.
He’s examining how different organisations approach continuous improvement and specifically whether organisations outside of the private sector (e.g hospitals, schools, charities, police etc.) are doing continuous improvement differently or better than private sector organisations and if there are opportunities for one sector to learn from the other(s)
The survey iink can be circulated to contacts in non-private sector organisation, so please feel free to send to it.
As a gesture of thanks to those who respond, Andy will give a small donation to the Red Cross and Oxfam for each survey completed.
Access the survey by clicking this link.
